The simple look and extra care that went into manufacturing the Angelbird wrk SSDs show that they are serious about breaking into the market. They have launched at a price slightly higher than average for the market but also bring the best sequential reads that Al has seen yet on a SATA drive. Legit Reviews pried the drive open to reveal the Silicon Motion SM2246EN SATA III 6Gbps SSD controller previously seen on Corsair, PNY, ADATA and Transcend SSDs, along with MLC flash and 256MB of DDR3 cache. In Legit Reviews testing of the drive they concluded that you should pick up the 256GB or 512GB model for the extra performance that it brings, you will not be disappointed.

"Angelbird might night be a household name, but the Austrian company has been around in the SSD market for a number of years and has gotten a reputation for having high quality products. When we found out that Angelbird was coming out with a new SSD product like called the SSD wrk we couldn’t wait to get our hands on one of these drives and see what Angelbird has to offer consumers. Read on to find out!"

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

Introduction:

You might have never heard of Angelbird - until now, that is. Angelbird Technologies GmbH is an SSD maker based out of Vorarlberg, Austria. Their product lines have historically focused around high end and Mac-based products, with a recent arch into portable SSDs (like their SSD2go line). Angelbird is known for their high build quality, and their products are assembled using a technique I can appreciate - vapor phase soldering - (seen here) a technique that puts the least possible thermal stress on the components, as well as ensuring all solder joints are oxygen free. While the vast majority of the their prior products have been build around SandForce controllers, today they have launched a new line, the SSD wrk:

The Angelbird SSD wrk is built around a new (to them) controller, the SM2246EN from Silicon Motion:

Silicon Motion prides themselves on making SSD controllers that deliver good performance at very low power consumption. For those wanting more detail on this particular controller technology, we have a detailed analysis from last August, available at this page.

Before even looking at the performance the real selling point of the new OCZ ARC 100 is the MSRP, the 240GB and 480GB models are slated to be released at $0.50/GB and will likely follow the usual trend of SSD prices and drop from there. The drives use the Barefoot 3 controller, this one clocked slightly lower than the Vertex 460 but still capable of accelerating encryption. Once The Tech Report set the drive up in their test bed the performance was almost on par with the Vertex 460 and other mid to high end SSDs, especially in comparison to the Crucial MX100.

"OCZ's latest value SSD is priced at just $0.50 per gig, but it hangs with mid-range and even high-end drives in real-world and demanding workloads. It's also backed by an upgraded warranty and some impressive internal reliability data provided by OCZ. We take a closer look:"

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging

Introduction:

OCZ is on what I would consider to be an upswing now that it exists under the relative safety of its parent company, Toshiba. Shortly after they were acquired, OCZ cut a bunch of unnecessary and/or redundant SKUs from their inventory and simultaneously began the transition of all of their product lines to exclusively use Toshiba branded flash. It only makes sense, given that flash is now available in-house - a luxury OCZ had wanted to have for quite some time. The changeover so far has refreshed the Vector 150, Vertex 460, and most recently the RevoDrive 350. Today OCZ has made another change, but instead of refreshing an old product, they are introducing a new one:

Behold the ARC 100!

To those wondering why OCZ needs another model SSD, and where that model will fall in their lineup, here's everything you need to see:

...so we have a slightly de-rated SSD, with the same Indilinx Barefoot controller, and the same Toshiba 19nm flash, but with a *significantly* reduced price. I wouldn't sweat the 20GB/day rating, as the vast majority of users will average far less than that daily when that usage is spread over a multi-year period. Even heavy gamers that blow through 100+GB of writes on an initial system and game install will still average far less than that over the subsequent months and years. Here is a look at the complete OCZ product spectrum, including their business and PCIe offerings:

In our prior (and this) review, we've covered the whole bottom row. While we have reviewed the Z-Drive 4500 / XL's predecessor (the Z-Drive R4), The 4500 is not yet on finalized firmware.

OK, so they've got my attention with this price thing, so lets see how well the ARC performs given its lower cost:

HGST has refreshed their 12Gbit/s SAS series of Ultrastar SSDs with denser 20nm which has upped the read speeds though the writes do suffer somewhat. As they are enterprise drives they have rather impressive lifespans, the 800GB is rated at 25 full drives writes/day for the length of the 5 year warranty. They also offer encryption and erasure tools that are superior to enthusiast drives, along with a much higher price tag. The Register also offers information on the new Ultrastar HDDs and a link to the spec sheets but as of yet we do not have any benchmarks.

Silicon Motion has announced their SM2256 controller. We caught a glimpse of this new controller on the Flash Memory Summit show floor:

The big deal here is the fact that this controller is a complete drop-in solution that can drive multiple different types of flash, as seen below:

The SM2256 can drive all variants of TLC flash.

The controller itself looks to have decent specs, considering it is meant to drive 1xnm TLC flash. Just under 100k random 4k IOPS. Writes are understandably below the max saturation of SATA 6Gb/sec at 400MB/sec (writing to TLC is tricky!). There is also mention of Silicon Motion's NANDXtend Technology, which claims to add some extra ECC and DSP tech towards the end of increasing the ability to correct for bit errors in the flash (more likely as you venture into 8 bit per cell territory).

At the Flash Memory Summit, Phison has updated their SSD controller lineup with a new quad-core SSD controller.

The PS3110 is capable of handling TLC as well as MLC flash, and the added horsepower lets it push as high as 100k IOPS.

Also seen was an upcoming PS5007 controller, capable of pushing PCIe 3.0 x4 SSDs at 300k IOPS and close to 3GB/sec sequential throughputs. While there were no actual devices on display of this new controller, we did spot the full specs:

According to an HGST press release, the company will bring an SSD based on phase change memory to the 2014 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California. They claim that it will actually be at their booth, on the show floor, for two days (August 6th and 7th).

The device, which is not branded, connects via PCIe 2.0 x4. It is designed for speed. It is allegedly capable of 3 million IOPS, with just 1.5 microseconds required for a single access. For comparison, the 800GB Intel SSD DC P3700, recently reviewed by Allyn, had a dominating lead over the competitors that he tested. It was just shy of 250 thousand IOPS. This is, supposedly, about twelve times faster.

While it is based on a different technology than NAND, and thus not directly comparable, the PCM chips are apparently manufactured at 45nm. Regardless, that is significantly larger lithography than competing products. Intel is manufacturing their flash at 20nm, while Samsung managed to use a 30nm process for their recent V-NAND launch.

What does concern me is the capacity per chip. According to the press release, it is 1Gb per chip. That is about two orders of magnitude smaller than what NAND is pushing. That is, also, the only reference to capacity in the entire press release. It makes me wonder how small the total drive capacity will be, especially compared to RAM drives.

Of course, because it does not seem to be a marketed product yet, nothing about pricing or availability. It will almost definitely be aimed at the enterprise market, though (especially given HGST's track record).

*** Update from Allyn ***

I'm hijacking Scott's news post with photos of the actual PCM SSD, from the FMS show floor:

In case you all are wondering, yes, it does in fact work:

One of the advantages of PCM is that it is addressed at smaller sections as compared to typical flash memory. This means you can see ~700k *single sector* random IOPS at QD=1. You can only pull off that sort of figure with extremely low IO latency. They only showed this output at their display, but ramping up QD > 1 should reasonably lead to the 3 million figure claimed in their release.

Marvell is notorious for being the first to bring a 6Gb/sec SATA controller to market, and they continue to do very well in that area. Their very capable 88SS9189 controller powers the Crucial MX100 and M550, as well as the ADATA SP920.

Today they have announced a newer controller, the 88SS1093. Despite the confusing numbering, the 88SS1093 has a PCIe 3.0 x4 host interface and will support the full NVMe protocol. The provided specs are on the light side, as performance of this controller will ultimately depend on the speed and parallelism of the attached flash, but its sure to be a decent performer. I suspect it would behave like their SATA part, only no longer bottlenecked by SATA 6Gb/sec speeds.

More to follow as I hope to see this controller in person on the exhibition hall (which opens to press in a few hours). Full press blast after the break.

*** Update ***

Apologies as there was no photo to be taken - Marvell had no booth at the exibition space at FMS.

Just minutes ago at the Flash Memory Summit, Samsung announced the production of 32-layer TLC VNAND:

This is the key to production of a soon-to-be-released 850 EVO, which should bring the excellent performance of the 850 Pro, with the reduced cost benefit we saw with the previous generation 840 EVO. Here's what the progression to 3D VNAND looks like:

3D TLC VNAND will look identical to the right most image in the above slide, but the difference will be that the charge stored has more variability. Given that Samsung's VNAND tech has more volume to store electrons when compared to competing 2D planar flash technology, it's a safe bet that this new TLC will come with higher endurance ratings than those other technologies. There is much more information on Samsung's VNAND technology on page 1 of our 850 Pro review. Be sure to check that out if you haven't already!

Another announcement made was more of an initiative, but a very interesting one at that. SSDs are generally dumb when it comes to coordinating with the host - in that there is virtually no coordination. An SSD has no idea which pieces of files were meant to be grouped together, etc (top half of this slide):

Stuff comes into the SSD and it puts it where it can based on its best guess as to how it should optimize those writes. What you'd want to have, ideally, is a more intelligent method of coordination between the host system and the SSD (more like the bottom half of the above slide). Samsung has been dabbling in the possibilities here and has seen some demonstrable gains to be made. In a system where they made the host software aware of the SSD flash space, and vice versa, they were able to significantly reduce write latency during high IOPS activity.

The key is that if the host / host software has more control over where and how data is stored on the SSD, the end result is a much more optimized write pattern, which ultimately boosts overall throughput and IOPS. We are still in the experimentation stage on Storage Intelligence, with more to follow as standards are developed and the industry pushes forward.

It might be a while before we see Storage Intelligence go mainstream, but I'm definitely eager to see 3D TLC VNAND hit the market, and now we know it's coming! More to follow in the coming days as we continue our live coverage of the Flash Memory Summit!